A coroner found Caroline Lovell died after giving birth to a healthy baby girl in a birthing pool in her lounge room
Two women have been charged with negligent manslaughter over a fatal Melbourne homebirth more than eight years ago.
Caroline Emily Lovell, 36, died after giving birth in a birthing pool in the lounge room of her Watsonia home in January 2012.
Continue reading...Bernard Gore was found dead in shopping centre’s fire stairs which stretched for 14km
A police officer has broken down while recalling the fruitless search for a retiree whose body was later discovered in the stairwell of a Sydney shopping centre, while a colleague has suggested they should have searched the stairs themselves.
Bernard Gore, 71, was found dead in the fire stairwell at Westfield Bondi Junction in late January 2017 some three weeks after he went missing.
Continue reading...Meriam Bebawy took the law into her own hands after another shopper grabbed a packet of toilet paper from her trolley at Woolworths, a magistrate has found
A Sydney magistrate has likened a coronavirus-fuelled stoush over toilet paper to a rugby league bust-up as he found a mother and daughter guilty of affray.
Health worker Meriam Bebawy, 23, and her daycare operator mother, Treiza Bebawy, 61, have been sentenced over an altercation with another woman at a Woolworths store in Chullora on 7 March.
Continue reading...Court hears officer struggles mentally since the attack: ‘Shame on you both’
A man repeatedly choked then bit a Queensland policewoman as his sister handcuffed the officer after the pair were kicked out of a Brisbane pub.
New Zealanders Hylton Miharo King, 24, and Ariana Thirteen King, 30, pleaded guilty to seriously assaulting the police officer at Mitchelton in May 2019.
Continue reading...Canadian police confirm man had ‘several’ weapons and will face multiple charges
Canadian police say the armed man who rammed a truck through the gates of the prime minister’s residence was loose for 13 minutes before authorities finally spotted him.
Media reports have identified the intruder as Corey Hurren, a reservist in the Canadian Rangers, a branch of the military that typically operates in remote and coastal regions.
Continue reading...Sarah Mitchell tells victims of teacher who allegedly preyed on Indigenous boys, she is ‘deeply sorry’ abuse occurred
The New South Wales education minister has apologised to victims of an alleged serial paedophile teacher who preyed on Indigenous boys for decades in the state’s west, saying she was “deeply sorry that those abuses occurred”.
A Guardian investigation last week revealed that since April 2018 the NSW government had quietly settled cases with more than a dozen men who were victims of Cletus O’Connor, a teacher, principal and school inspector who worked for the state education department for more than three decades.
Continue reading...A 43-year-old man was due to appear in court on Tuesday after the death of the child in the suburb of Cannon Hill
A 43-year-old man has been charged with murder following the “sudden death” of a four-year-old girl in Brisbane.
A crime scene was declared in Bent Street, Cannon Hill, in the city’s east around 9.30am Monday.
Continue reading...CCTV footage shows man strolling through exhibits at closed Australian Museum and posing for selfies with head inside mouth of T-Rex skull
A Sydney man will face court on Monday after allegedly breaking into Australia’s oldest museum and snapping selfies with the dinosaur exhibit.
The man broke into the heritage-listed Australian Museum in Sydney’s CBD just after 1am on Sunday 10 May, and was captured on CCTV cameras wandering around the exhibits for around 40 minutes, according to New South Wales police.
Continue reading...Police allege the 44-year-old travelled to Syria in 2012 and 2013 to fight ‘for months at a time’
A Sydney man has been charged after allegedly fighting for an al-Qaida-linked Syrian terrorist group “for months at a time” in 2012 and 2013.
The 44-year-old was due to face Parramatta bail court on Saturday after tactical police arrested him in a car park in Mount Lewis on Friday.
Continue reading...A new taskforce called Operation Ribbon will keep police in contact with high-risk perpetrators and their victims
Of the approximately 7,000 calls relating to family violence made to Victoria police in the past month, 14% have related to Covid-19, the state’s deputy police commissioner, Shane Patton, said on Tuesday.
When police attended those incidents they were told by the alleged victim or alleged perpetrator that having to stay at home together had exacerbated animosity. Patton said that while there had not been an increase recorded in the number of assaults, police were preparing for such an outcome, and had already experienced an increase in reporting by third parties.
Continue reading...From the final verdict on George Pell to devastating Great Barrier Reef bleaching, here’s our roundup of important stories
As Australia’s coronavirus outbreak continues, a lot of important news has slipped under the radar.
Here are the most important stories you may have missed over the past week. From the statement of George Pell’s accuser to the worst coral bleaching the Great Barrier Reef has ever seen.
Continue reading...Australian high court’s decision is Pell’s last chance to overturn conviction for historical child sexual abuse
On Tuesday, almost two years after being committed to stand trial on multiple charges of historical child sexual abuse, the case against the former financial controller of the Vatican, Cardinal George Pell, will likely end with him either walking free or remaining in jail to serve the rest of his sentence.
After failing to appeal to Victoria’s appellate court in August, Pell’s legal team took his case to the high court, the final avenue in his bid for freedom. Across two days in March, the full bench of seven justices heard Pell’s barrister Bret Walker SC argue that Victoria’s appellate judges, who dismissed Pell’s first appeal in 2019 by a majority of two-to-one, may have been unduly influenced by the complainant’s testimony by watching a recorded video of it rather than just reading the transcript of his evidence.
Continue reading...Australia’s home affairs minister had linked New Zealand prime minister’s comments to her upcoming re-election bid
New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has brushed off criticism from Australia’s home affairs minister Peter Dutton, saying his policy decisions are “regrettable”.
At her weekly news conference in Wellington on Monday, Ardern was scathing about Dutton’s criticism of her recent meeting with Scott Morrison, saying it was not her plain-talking that was to blame for increasing tensions between the neighbours – but Australia’s policy decisions on immigration matters which were hurting Kiwis.
Continue reading...The New Zealand prime minister was justified in taking Scott Morrison to task over a policy that is both spurious and damaging
We’ve seen this movie before.
Then, in Love Actually, Hugh Grant played the unlikely prime minister of Britain, standing up to an oleaginous Billy Bob Thornton as president of the US.
Continue reading...Police comments last week that they were keeping an ‘open mind’ on the murder of Hannah Clarke and her three young children by her former partner were widely condemned. In this episode of Full Story, reporter Ben Smee looks at the track record of Queensland police on domestic violence, and we hear from one woman about her own shocking story
You can read Ben Smee’s reporting on Dani’s case here, and his piece about how Hannah Clarke’s murder exposes a ‘failure in our system’.
You can also read his reporting on Queensland woman Julie, who was forced to go into hiding after a senior constable, Neil Punchard, accessed her address from a police database and sent it to her violent former husband.
Continue reading...Domestic violence campaigners appalled force wants to consider suggestions Rowan Baxter was ‘driven too far’ when he set fire to his family in their car in Brisbane
Queensland police have revealed that a man who killed his wife and three children by dousing them with petrol and setting them alight had a history of domestic violence and was known to them.
But in comments that have shocked domestic violence campaigners, the force says they are keeping an “open mind” about suggestions the 42-year-old Rowan Baxter had been “driven too far” and are appealing to people who knew the couple to come forward to understand his motives.
Continue reading...Waks, now an advocate for Jewish abuse victims, was one of a number of children Cyprys abused at Melbourne’s Chabad Yeshivah centre
A child abuse victim who blew the whistle on abuse within the Orthodox Chabad sect of Judaism in Australia has been awarded $804,170 in damages in a civil case brought against his perpetrator and serial abuser, David Cyprys, in Melbourne.
Manny Waks was about 13 years old when he was first abused by Cyprys at the Elwood synagogue, and he was also abused at the Chabad Yeshivah centre in Melbourne.
Continue reading...NSW detective is defending charges of illegally making recordings during investigation into disappearance of three-year-old William
William Tyrrell’s foster family has blasted the “personal agendas” of police behind the prosecution of former detective Gary Jubelin, saying the investigation into the boy’s disappearance has been “cavalier” following his removal.
Jubelin is defending four charges of illegally recording elderly neighbour Paul Savage during an investigation into the 2014 disappearance of the three-year-old from the NSW mid-north coast.
Continue reading...Australian federal police say livestreaming of children performing sexual acts marks ‘alarming shift’
Australian paedophiles are paying as little as A$15 for children to perform sexual acts online while being filmed in the Philippines, according to the head of the Australian federal police team in Manila.
Senior officer Andrew Perkins told Guardian Australia there was an “alarming shift” from previously more common types of “sex tourism” to “convenient and low-risk” online abuse of children which can be customised to the specific requirements of customers.
Continue reading...NSW police are investigating the possibility the husband of the woman, who was found in Pymble, has fled to China with two children
The body of a woman has been found in a freezer in a unit on Sydney’s upper north shore.
Police officers discovered the body of the woman, believed to be in her 30s, after forcing their way into a unit in Pymble on Wednesday morning.
Continue reading...